Mr. Verb

Some of the Wisconsin Englishes folks have talked off and on about doing maps of 'linguistic resources' in communities, figuring out where different languages are used in businesses and community organizations, for instance. Turns out that Tucson is ahead of Wisconsin ... the Language Capital Project has started mapping businesses where various languages from all around the world are spoken. Tucson is a great place to do this since it is not just a university town and a place with a large immigrant population, but it's also a place that has become home to significant numbers of refugees.

Wonderful project and, I trust, an inspiration and a model to the Wisconsin Englishes folks!

You know about the Cupertino Effect, no doubt — the miscorrections introduced by spellcheckers for terms spelled correctly but not in the spelling dictionary. It's been often discussed on the Log and other linguablogs (Click here for their latest post on this.)

A kind of layered Cupertino was just reported by a Team Verb member in proofs of a forthcoming publication: The language family Yeniseian was in the manuscript with a double-typo as Yenesian. Oops. Had that come through as submitted, the authors probably wouldn't have caught it. As luck would have it, though, it appears in the proofs as Keynesian.

Does Microsoft get bonus points for being at least within the social sciences?

Thanks to Dennis Baron's post to ads-l yesterday (which you can also read here), many of us have been reminded that it's "International Mother Language Day", so designated by UNESCO. The folks at UNESCO have done a pretty massive Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger, with nice interactive mapping, pretty extensively updated and developed since the earlier versions, if memory serves. These maps are always fraught with problems, even when they're done by really good specialists, and it would be easy to nitpick about how 'unsafe' the status of Welsh is or whether Hawaiian is best counted as 'critically endangered' or not. Personally, I'm not always comfortable with what counts as a language in various cases.

But this isn't a place for a lot of griping: it's a very nice and powerful tool. You can zoom in to places, as you see below for Belgium and surrounding areas (showing the rollover on Walloon here), display languages by estimated numbers of speakers, etc.

So, happy International Mother Tongue Day. I'll be speaking mine some today, if the phone lines to the home country are working.